Hands on: limitations of Google Fast Flip make it a novelty

Google's new Fast Flip service is sort of like a newsreader and sort of like a …

Google has announced the public availability of another one of its Google Labs projects—one that aims to improve efficiency in reading content on the web. Google Fast Flip presents online content in visual magazine format for easy browsing and quick scanning, the way people read when they have print media in front of them instead of the wall of text presented by most feed readers.

The way we would describe Fast Flip would be that it's not quite a feed reader, and not quite an online magazine. The front page of Fast Flip presents you with several rows of content that can be sorted by topic—the top row lets you choose between recent, most viewed, and recommended headlines, while the second row lets you choose between various hot topics (unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift resides in this row as of this writing), and the third row lets you choose between specific news sources.

Clicking on the Taylor Swift tab, for example, presents news from a variety of different sources discussing the drama bomb that Kanye West dropped on the MTV Video Music Awards last weekend.

If you click on a specific item you want to read, that item will take up the screen (as a giant image, not as a text article) with a navigation device on each side for you to easily scroll to the next or previous articles. From here, you can "Like" it (for use with Google Reader), e-mail it to a friend, and share it via a multitude of social sharing sites.

(At the top and bottom of the image, there is a link to the original article, which is available in a copy/pasteable text form.)

There is even a mobile version of Fast Flip for iPhone and Android users. Though the front page is laid out differently (to account for the mobile screen, of course), the functionality is largely the same—choose from a variety of topics and, at least on the iPhone, swipe left or right to scroll through available articles. You can then zoom in and out to read them, "Like" the articles, and share them with others.

The interface is a novel way of approaching online content consumption, though it may not stick for many readers given Fast Flip's current limitations. For example, the service is currently limited to about three dozen publishers, according to Google, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. You won't be able to add your own feeds or directly customize your Fast Flip home page—at least for the time being. Instead, Fast Flip attempts to customize the experience for you by watching the types of content you click on and presenting you with more content like it, either from the same topics, same journalists, or same sources. (Of course, even if it started allowing users to add their own sites and customize the home page, some users would still shy away from the magazine-like interface.)

So, what's the point of Fast Flip besides offering yet another interface with which to browse the same content? Google says that it believes when people can read article faster, they will also read more of them, therefore driving more ad revenue to publishers. Unsurprisingly, the 36 or so publishers that Google is using for Fast Flip have entered into a revenue sharing agreement with Google.

Fast Flip is an interesting way to quickly read through content, but it's unlikely to be the first option that comes to mind for most of us. It may, however, provide a casual outlet for flipping through headlines while bored on the train or bus. Since Fast Flip is still part of Google Labs, it will undoubtedly be improved upon as more users check it out and offer suggestions back to Google. For now, however, it's largely a novelty that is fun to flip through.